This story originally ran in the Chicago Tribune on Sept. 29, 1989.
MOSCOW — The conservative chief of the Ukrainian Communist Party lost his position as boss of the Soviet Union’s strongest political machine Thursday to a progressive protege of President Mikhail Gorbachev.
Gorbachev had sharply criticized the dictatorial style of the ousted official, Vladimir Shcherbitsky, who ran the Ukraine and its 50 million people with an iron hand for 17 years.
He was retired in a meeting of Ukrainian Communists, which Gorbachev attended.
(Editor’s note: Some Ukrainians blamed Shcherbitsky for covering up the radiation damage from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, for restraining the local news media, and for the arrests and harassment of dissidents. Read more.)
The new Ukrainian party boss is Vladimir Ivashko, who was Shcherbitsky’s second-in-command. Ivashko three weeks ago used the pages of the daily newspaper Izvestia to sharply criticize absolute commanders unresponsive to the public.
Ivashko, an economist and engineer, was chosen in a competitive, secret ballot, the official Tass news agency said.
Shcherbitsky had been expected to lose the Ukrainian job after he was retired from the Soviet Union’s ruling Politburo last week in a shakeup that cemented Gorbachev’s hold on power.
The meeting Thursday of the Ukrainian Communist Party Central Committee was highlighted by Gorbachev’s warning to Ukrainian Communists to stop fighting reform groups and start listening to their ideas and complaints.
Shcherbitsky told the meeting he was in poor health and wished to retire. With the exception of Gorbachev, Shcherbitsky was the last member of the Politburo picked by the late President Leonid Brezhnev, whose rule is now officially termed the “period of stagnation.”
Activists in Ukraine blamed the 71-year-old Shcherbitsky and his assistants for slowing economic and political reform in the nation’s breadbasket and industrial heartland.
Activists said he remained in power as long as he did because Gorbachev did not have the political strength to oust him, or because Gorbachev needed his strong-arm tactics to keep Ukrainian nationalists in line.
In the Izvestia article, Ivashko described himself as “a stubborn supporter of choosing leaders from below.”
“This is critically important, for after all it is impossible to change the system if one absolute commander is simply replaced by another,” he said. The 56-year-old Ivashko, who was promoted to the No. 2 job in the Ukrainian Communist Party in December last year, is considered a supporter and protege of Gorbachev.
Ivashko became a candidate member of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee in 1986, shortly after Gorbachev came to power. He was promoted to a full, voting member in April, when 110 mostly elderly conservatives were retired.
Last winter, top Communists nominated Ivashko as one of the 100 candidates for 100 uncontested seats reserved for the party in the new Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies, said a Western analyst.
Shcherbitsky, in contrast, was one of the few Politburo members who had to run in a contested election. He chose a safe candidacy in his home base in the Dnepropetrovsk region after workers in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev turned him down three times.
Tass said Ivashko ran for the first secretary job Thursday against another Ukrainian Communist official, Stanislav Gurenko. The news agency did not report vote totals.
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